Trump holds cabinet meeting amid asylum crackdown and drug narco trafficking attacks

Fox's Eben Brown reports on whether or not the second strike on an alleged cocaine boat was legal

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
All right, so we'll pivot and go over to the

(00:02):
Legacy Retirement Group dot com phone line and check in
with Fox News Evan Brown. Evan, good morning. President Trump
had his final Cabinet meeting yesterday. A couple of interesting
points there, starting with the Venezuelan drug boats being blown up,
and the specific issue was this one back in September,
where there were two strikes on the same boat. What's

(00:25):
the story here, Well.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
The story is that there is criticism of the action
back in September in which the strike was made on
one of these vessels and then a second strike was
made after determining that some of the people on board survived.
There have been accusations of this being a war crime
or a violation of international law. I don't really think

(00:48):
that a it raises to the level of war crime,
and it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with international law.
The US doesn't subscribe too much of that concept party
to things like the Hague for good reason. We don't
want a politicized kangaroo court having jurisdiction over legal matters
for American citizens, right, especially a court that's not an

(01:11):
American court. So that's one thing I don't really think
too many people are taking seriously. However, there is some
question of whether or not this was legal by our
own American law, and that may be a question that
needs answering. But I will say that when these operations
are undertaken, there are teams of Pentagon lawyers who evaluate

(01:35):
every operation and present the commander with every and all
scenarios and what the legal implications are for each of
those scenarios. And so I don't think this happened in
the dark in any kind of way that would really
be out of character for the Pentagon.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
I'm glad you brought that up, because they're just not
flying willy nilly here by the seat of their pants
and making decisions without being informed. And Press Secretary Caroline
Levitt said that it was not Pete hegg Sath who
gave the command to hit that boat twice. It was
a Navy admiral and that he was well within his
authority to make that second strike. And you know, but
at the very base level, Evan, you know, if we're

(02:15):
okay with, you know, blowing up a drug boat with
one strike and potentially killing all passengers aboard, you know,
why are we not okay? By sending a second strike
in to make sure that all of those passengers are
narco terrorists are dead.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
I think part of the complaint is political in nature.
There are people who simply don't like what President Trump
and Secretary heg Seth are doing in general, and don't
like them in general, and so therefore they're using this
as an excuse. And I will put at least one
penny down to say that if Democrats win control of
the Congress in next year's midterms, that they might use

(02:53):
something like this for impeach o rama version three. So
that's something to think about. The Other thing is that
there's still a lot of people who are not quite
on board with the idea that the Trump administration has
prescribed these drug runners and drug gangs and cartels as
terrorist organizations, and therefore we are treating them as enemy

(03:16):
combatants and not necessarily as criminals. Whereas heretofore, we interdicted
boats at sea, and we captured drug runners, and we
charged them criminally in federal courts. We indicted them, We
gave them opportunities to hire some very good lawyers and
to go to trial and make plea bargains and end
up with short term sentences in low security federal prisons,

(03:41):
or maybe even never see prison at all. In this case,
we're treating them as enemy combatants and we're killing them.
And we have a good twenty some odd years of
how to deal with enemy combatants that we have described
the terrorists to be right, it was called the war
on Terror. The people complaining about how what's happening with

(04:03):
these drug boats were very silent when another president authorized
the drone strike and killing of an American citizen overseas
because he was engaging in terrorist masterminding. And his name
was Anwar al Alaki, and the president was Barack Obama.
That was an American citizen who was killed without a warrant,
without a trial, without anything like that, simply because he

(04:26):
had taken up arms against the United States.